Crosstalk: Shiny-like without Shiny
Self-service interactive tools have great power to support decisions by policy-makers. Shiny apps are a natural fit for this, but it’s not always easy to share them within the public sector. This is due to issues like a lack of server space, highly sensitive data and users who aren’t R-savvy.
We’ve approached this problem in the UK’s Department for Education by sharing interactive HTML widgets – embeddable JavaScript visualisation libraries – within RMarkdown outputs. Interactivity is, however, limited because selections in one widget don’t impact the data presented in another.
Joe Cheng’s Crosstalk package overcomes this with shared data objects that react to user inputs, altering the content of multiple widgets on the fly. I’ll explain how I used Crosstalk to develop a ‘pseudo-app’ for exploring schools data with the Leaflet (maps), Plotly (charts) and DT (tables) widgets inside the Flexdashboard framework and how I shared it easily with policy-making users as a static HTML file for exploration in the browser.